Phi for All

I've told this here before, but I had an experience when I was about 8-10 years old. I'd gone to bed, and woke up when I heard something tapping. My window was open, and my brain identified the sound as a woman in heels walking up to our front door. I waited for the footsteps to stop and the doorbell to ring, but they just kept clicking, as if she was pacing beneath my window. I got out of bed and pulled the curtain back to look down and it stopped, and there was nobody there. I went back to bed, and a few minutes later it started up again. Lather, rinse, repeat a few times, exactly the same way. I couldn't figure it out. Eventually I gave up on the idea of it being someone outside, and I think that made me listen more closely. I saw that the wind from my open window was moving the curtains, which made the plastic curtain pull knock against the wall. When I pulled the curtains aside to look down, it moved the plastic pull away from the wall and stopped the clicking. I do remember how convinced I was at the time that the sound was a woman walking in heels on a concrete sidewalk, but when I figured out what it really was, it didn't sound anywhere close. It sounded exactly like a curtain pull clicking against the wall.

! Moderator Note This is the last time I'm going to explain this to you. If someone questions the rationality of your statements, they're NOT making it personal. We attack ideas here to make them stronger. What we DO NOT allow here is to attack people. You need to STOP attacking people and focus on the ideas they're presenting. If you insult people like this again, you'll be banned. You should understand the difference by now.

I reject this completely. I think what a person believes matters a LOT. I know humans are wired to look for simple patterns, but much of what we believe requires a greater level of sophistication and clarity. Statements like this miss the mark, and keep us from delving deeper.

Exactly.

Are you suggesting this as evidence that God hates dinosaurs and loves mothers?

But it's not a personal belief, it's a LACK of belief, so I object to being lumped in with those who believe ("like most theists do"). And I think the rest of the problem I have with atheism being compatible with religion has more to do with my definition of "religion".

So I can be an atheist while practicing a non-theistic religion? I always defined at least part of my own atheism as a rejection of practiced religious beliefs.

In which areas do they NOT exclude each another?

It's a mistake to say "there's no end of material to feed on" when the material has a limit ("light years across"). As beecee says, what dictates the size of a star is its mass, or the dust and gases it accumulates as it forms.

In science, "take into account" means analyzing the evidence. You can remain neutral (null hypothesis) while waiting for such evidence to be presented, but I really don't see how you can consider the possibility of god(s) without any. You don't have to claim god(s) don't exist if you just ignore them until they do something observably god-like.

Evolution is changes in allele frequency within a population over time. It would be your children and their children that continue to evolve.

Is there anything you can post here that doesn't require watching a video or linking offsite? A brief summary of your concept would be much appreciated.

He's wrong. They're all lamps, but some are configured as bulbs (the bulbous ones), some as floods or spots or reflectors. They're either incandescent or luminescent.

Whataboutist arguments are hollow and feeble, especially this one. You're basically saying, "Better the devil you know...". Are devils all that Russia has to offer its people?

How would an immoral win in Germany have affected the path of the Allied countries? Would the US have stopped with just two atomic bombs in Japan? With worldwide approval of using immoral tactics to win wars, I'd imagine the US would swing towards authoritarianism much sooner than it has. We'd have had a Trump in office instead of an Eisenhower, or a Kennedy, or a Carter. There's very little that's moral about warfare, but when you defend your country's borders, you're also defending it's fundamental values.

Witch weigh?

Assassination is a fascist tool. Be careful of authoritarian responses to authoritarianism. The pigs just love it when you get down in the mud with them.

I didn't see it as a multiple comma violation. I thought they left out the word "for", as in "Rachel Ray finds inspiration in cooking FOR her family and her dog".

Since Reagan basically did the same thing Biden did, except he claimed he'd nominate a woman to the SCOTUS if she was qualified, it seems many folks nowadays just assumed a black woman wouldn't have those qualifications. And then GOP leadership treated Jackson like she was stinking up the place, enforcing systemic prejudice and doing their best to make sure an eminently qualified black woman would not move forward. My ass it had nothing to do with race.

I enthusiastically recommend Trump with no qualifications whatsoever. In my opinion, we'd be very fortunate to get him to actually work for us. I can assure you that no person would be better for the job. I can't say enough good things about him, nor recommend him too highly.

This is exactly how I view it. We reap a LOT of benefits from living in dense populations, and we have to be responsible for doing our parts to keep each other safe.

I think the same mindset that refuses to be vaccinated out of fear of X (chips, autism, Jewish space lasers, etc) causes these same folks to view wearing masks and isolating as an affront to their freedom. A guy asked me in the store the other day why I was still wearing a mask after they lifted the mandates. I told him I'd still be wearing it for COVID 19, but in this instance it's because I have a spring cold with a cough that I didn't want to spread to others. He just nodded at me, and had nothing to say. I think he was prepared to tell me how dumb it was to wear the mask for COVID-19, but he couldn't say the same about the spring crud. I think he realized he didn't want to catch it, and I hope it made him think better about wearing masks to prevent the spread of unwanted contagions. And communities have been performing successful draconian lockdowns on plagues and viruses for centuries. I'm not sure what makes some modern folks so blasé about pandemic illness and death. Do we see too much of it on TV? Have we become numb to it? I'm so appalled when I hear someone defending a relative who refused to get vaccinated, caught COVID-19, ended up in the hospital, and eventually died on a respirator. They sound proud that their mama/daddy/sibling went to their grave standing by their convictions, and they'll also tell you they don't plan to get the jab either. So tell me how to make universal vaxing seem smart when some folks think they're smarter by avoiding it?

Too late, you did that when you chose to link to politically biased reports. It's quite clear to me he DID read the assessments, and used the erroneous stances and faulty conclusions to form his opinion, not simply because the researchers use scare tactic language and GOP talking points.

My TikTok feed is mostly black women like Lizzo singing About Damn Time. I haven't seen a single one (other than the woman in koti's link) misrepresenting this appointment as an affirmative action hire, so I wonder how prevalent this stance is in the black community. She's got her opinion and I think it's wrong. If she wants to ask Judge Jackson whether she was "handed" her job because she's a black woman, I would encourage the young woman to do so. Then again, I've never seen a definition of "affirmative action" that wasn't crying about outright discrimination against white males, so perhaps it means something different to you.

It's challenging but interesting as well. Along the lines of removing "oriental" from your lexicon, I found out a few weeks ago that I've been abusing the Hindi greeting "Namaste" ever since I first heard it. Apparently some Americans went to India to learn yoga from the masters there, and brought the word back but used it poorly. It's supposed to be reserved for addressing the yogis, an honorific term, one that shouldn't be used for just anyone. People from India cringe when they hear us say it along the lines of "Have a nice day". I feel a bit silly now, like I've been mistakenly calling you "Your Majesty", and thinking you'd appreciate it.